Readers' comments

I really wish people would get the nomenclature right. Amish may be considered Pennsylvania Dutch, but most Pennsylvania Dutch are not Amish. Immigrants, who were really refugees from the French aggression of Louis XIV are the Pennsylvania Dutch. These German speaking Rhinelander Germans who were mostly protestants and were burned out by retreating French armies at the end of the 1600s and into the 1700s. Queen Ann of England allowed them to immigrate to Britain and William Penn convinced many, including my ancestors to move to Pennsylvania. The name PA Dutch was a mispronunciation of Deutch or German. Get it right people.

I don't see Pennsylvania Dutch going anywhere, the Amish especially have a solid, if isolated, society and that is the language they use to communicate with each other. So it should not be a surprise that the language isn't going anywhere. Using English would be an odd thing for them, I don't really see why they would just start using English in place of their "native" language.

I don't feel that wanting English only in this country as strange. I am all for keeping your native tongue & learning second or third etc languages. But I get tired of going to the bank & having the default be Spanish in the USA. As for the Amish we have them in every state practically & I enjoy seeing them. I don't see a point of having a show that encourages them to leave. I guess after the last 4 years of getting a mind boggling schooling on the intentions of the left in this country, I am suspect of everything I see on tv. The left & the Athiest groups in our country are doing what they have done in Europe for a long time. Trying to take religion out of our society & I am just cynical enough to wonder if they are now working on breaking them. I watch almost no regular tv because just like the writer I see an incredible dumbing down of tv & I see subtle & not so subtle agends being pushed by leftist that nearly totally permeate that industry. Never saw Honey Boo Boo either. Read more of her in the DM on line.

I'm not a fan of exploiting the Amish people, but in no way are they encouraged to leave. Young Amish people leave their communities all the time, whether televised or not. The show "Amish Out of Order" is actually a better documentary type show that's about Amish people who have left their communities and the challenges they face. The program on TLC is a little glamorized, a little too much like "Real World"

I was disappointed with this article. I felt like there was a large opportunity to have a very long article about the different varieties of American accent. It would have been nice to have included a blurb about Mid-Atlantic, and other interesting sub dialects.

Thanks for the article. I wonder if "actor" is the correct way of describing the young adventurers. Since it is a reality show, or maybe a documentary, perhaps "participant" or "subject" would be more accurate. "Actor" carries connotations of falsity, rather than reality.

true but 'actor' also has the connotation of being a professional; perhaps even being skilled to variant degree. Very few make it from reality show participant to full-fledged actor. True some become famous (more likely infamous) and maintain a haphazard career as a generic celebrity but you don't see many transitioning from Survivor to movie headliner.

They have had to recently add a bit of an asterisk to this show. It seems that the actors are probably Amish, but this probably isn't the first time they left their homes. In other words, these kids grew up Amish, left some time ago, and were recently hired to play a historical version of themselves. "Reality" TV does not mean unscripted.

The author of this article seems to think highly of his own knowledge bank... but I can't really respect someone who "grew up within driving distance to the large Amish community in Lancaster, Pennsylvania" yet knows nothing of Pennsylvania Dutch. I thought it was common knowledge.

And that he marvels over how "extraordinary" it is that they have retained their German dialect so long when other groups assimilate and lose their mother tongue by the third generation. Is it REALLY that difficult to imagine that a group that remains entirely separate from the rest of society, interacts primarily with its own members, and eschews television and radio would retain their own dialect??? Good lord, maybe we should introduce this chump to the thousands of dialects in rural pockets around Europe! It might just shock him dead.

I wouldn't have a cogent explanation for it, not even an incogent one. I lived in New York City for a few years many years ago. I never had the occasion to acquaint myself with the minority community in the neighborhood of Canal Street, aka Chinatown. Unlike the Amish in Lancaster, there isn’t a physical boundary to this linguistic and cultural minority community. It is not “one-hour drive away”. It is right there. One walks into it and out of it. One roams freely in it. Lots of people do that. They stop and eat in one of the many restaurants. And leave.

In addition to Canal Street, I never took time to visit the Statute and learn about the details of her history. There was also Ellis Island close by somewhere. I never even knew it existed until later I learned about it on PBS. Then there was Little Italy. I never stopped and asked whether they spoke Italian there and if they did whether it was Sicilian, Corsican or the fancy kind. Then there was Orchard Street. Jewish merchants selling original French haute couture at cut-rate prices. Sometimes even antique buttons. Is that what they speak –Yiddish? Never occurred to me to ask.

The indigenous inhabitants of Chinatown would speak one of 2 sub-dialects of Cantonese, a major dialect in spoken Chinese. Chinese (I notice by your name you are not Chinese, so I am writing it down in case the knowledge cannot be assumed, notwithstanding an implied impressive knowledge bank) is one of the 5 official languages used by the United Nations. Official Language means it is equipped with simultaneous interpreting capability and a written transcript for what orally transpired. In the case of Chinese, written transcript means the transcripts in the characters, not the phonetics.

But I never stopped and asked in those days when I visited Canal Street about the details of the people’s lives and checked out the dialects they spoke.

I wrote 3 paragraphs - A round-about way of saying it occurred to me I have just lost your respect in even bigger way than the writer of this Johnson article has lost your respect. Lancaster was for him/her one hour away by car. My places were 5 minutes by subway.

I look forward to seeing some concrete demonstration in your future post of the content in your knowledge bank, the basis for your loss of respect.

Meantime, Johnson has earned my respect, not only because I am sympathetic for having personally committed the same crime charged, but more precisely because Johnson claims no more knowledge than he/she has, small or large the bank. Nobody knows everything about everything. To think they do is the first sure warning ignorance is doing the talking, small or large the bank. I read in the opening sentence a candor reflecting of self-assurance. I picked up nuance (some of which provided by links to fact source) reflective of clear intelligence, and the writing style is delightful (no frightening “-ism”’s) to read. For me, a decided “Encore! Johnson!” :)

Thanks for an informative article that is such pleasant reading at the same time. Duly noted and appreciated are the embedded links throughout. :)

My own 2-cents on immigrant minority language communities. It is true after a few generations, the original "mother tongue" will have become eroded to make room for the language of the host country.

I am surmising the degree of erosion is a function of the properties of the language to be assimilated and the language to be preserved. Controlling for the absence of a religious reason for any kind of self-imposed isolation (such as the case of Amish), when there is little or nothing in common between the mother-tongue and the tongue of the host country, other phenomena or variations on the same phenomenon may emerge - the new generation learns to use the host country language while entirely or near entirely drops the mother language. Examples of the "dropping" is found in the third and fourth generation Chinese settlers in Chinatowns. They would be folks who were born in American to a lineage of great-grands who immigrated in the 1800's. Many of them listen to Chinese (mostly a variety of regional sub-dialects of Cantonese)and understand it 100% but few would write it. Many do not read it, although at this point their parents still do. N.B.: This comment addresses the Chinese spoken in small Chinese communities in Chinatown. The new wave of immigrants since the 1950's present an entirely different picture.

It is a tradition in the Amish to allow teenagers to go out into the world for a year or two to see what it is all about. They can sow their wild oats and then if they are still interested, return to the Amish community without any fear of shunning.
Those interested in the language of the Amish should look to the best collection of books on the subject at the Library of the University of Pennsylvania, which has one of the better German language collections in the world and certainly the best on the language of the Pennsylvania Dutch (ie not Dutch but German.)

Thanks for the info on where to look for a good source to get informed. And mention of the teenagers' being given a time-window of a year or two to explore the world without the penalty of being shunned. The joy of reading readers' comments who are generous to share what they know. Again, thanks.

So as an island of German isolated in a sea of English, they have presumably also been isolated from 'German German' since the 18th century? It would be interesting to compare the two today and observe the evolutionary differences.

I suppose its one of the downfalls of its success that I cant imagine a similarly interesting situation ever occurring in the English language, unless there is a hidden colony of expats living in a particularly steep valley on the costa del sol.

About 2 decades ago Eddie Izzard did a series (the roots of English?). As part of this he travelled to Friesland in the north of the Netherlands. He was able to converse in Chaucer style English (Middle?) with a lady who was a Frieslander - as long as he kept to agricultural matters.

Yes, I remember reading about linguists who had looked into that when I took a linguistics course in undergrad. Really interesting, but a while ago.

And apparently the English spoken in the (relatively) isolated areas of the Appalacian mountains retains some features of 18th and 19th-century English that the rest of America abandoned before the British did -- sentences where one can go a-verbing are the example I remember best.

TLC is now a reality TV channel with a pseudo-intellectual bent, The History Channel is now The Military Channel, and the Discovery Channel is sharks, lions, tigers and Bear Grylls. Hell, even National Geographic is now highly commercial. Sad, really, I learned so much from them when I was 8-12.

National Geographic was the only magazine my sister took and exposed her children to when they were 8-12. Explains, to me anyway, why they have grown up to be the informed, curious, balanced young people they are now. You are right, even it has become very commerical. Money talks, in a bad way, often. Too often.

I too voraciously devoured National Geographic as a child, reading back issues to 1989. I haven't been a subscriber for some 4 years now because of time issues, but if I recall correctly the magazine has stayed true to its intellectual roots.

I am envious of my nephews and now of you! Love your comments everywhere I find them. Whether I agree or disgree. Most times you know more about the subject you comment on ('cause you had National Geographic and I didn't! ;)) and I know nothing. So I get to not open my loud mouth. :)

I guess I've saved myself the agony of watching it decline. Same thing happened to Scientific American about a decade ago, or at least to say, they went "main stream". A nice euphemism for dumbing things down to the point of not being interesting; when the science and technology section of TE became more informative, I cancelled a long standing subscription to SA.

Any television - even called National Geographic Channel - can do only one thing effectively: convert human brain into porridge. The way to go is to throw away your TV set, not to look - in vain - for a decent channel. I did it about 15 years ago... what a relief! I cannot forgive myself I didn't do it 15 years earlier.
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Well, the Amish are right in more things than one...

I wouldn't trade that knowledge to be more of a polyglot. It is nice to know more than one language. But it is more important to be educated in one. Imagine being dumb in more than one language. Say one knows a dozen languages, but has nothing to say in any one of them. You want that? Not me. :) You really write very well in Chinese. Please don't give up. Practice a little every day. It is worth it. Completely worth it. :)

So true! It is not clear where the impetus to dumb people down came from. So strange!

I think there is a general decline in the quality of things across the board, from the things we read, to the music we hear, to the fabrics we wear. The decline began with the schools, and it has spread to the universities. A few die-hards insist on upkeeping the standards, and they risk being scorned for the sin of "pretention" (Hm... I am reminded someone used to mock me for being guilty of something like that upon a time at TE, not that I matched anything close to any high standard. We are friends now. Isn't that wonderful? The magic of focusing on the substance of a conversation, not stuff that don't matter. Anyway, all's well that ends well. :))

What you need to keep in mind is that a commercial TV network is first and foremost a business and therefore, regardless of what their original intentions may be, their priority is always ratings, which translates to profits. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that more and more of channels like A&E (formerly called the Arts and Entertainment Network), TLC, and the History Channel (and to a lesser extent, National Geographic and Discovery Channels) would resort to reality shows to fill their lineup as they are cheap to produce and enough people watch them to ensure profitability through ad revenues.

The argument could thus be made that private sector TV is not particularly capable of producing true educational content, and therefore public television must fill that void. Here in Toronto, where I reside, the best educational programs are produced by PBS and TVOntario (the province of Ontario's own public TV channel); the CBC, our national public TV network, also produces some good content as well. The same probably also applies to public broadcasting in other countries (e.g. BBC).

Hm, so the situation is best described as lost-lost one. Private TV is just a vehicle for commercial advertising; state TV is a vehicle for political one. The BBC is indeed a good example: once known for its objective reporting, now the acronym stands for British Bullsh*t Centre or Bloody British Communists. What a shame! Many years ago my young daughter was sure that in her native Bulgarian the name for wireless was "BBC", because she never heard someone around to ask "Please turn on the radio set". It was always "Turn on the BBC" instead. Sic transit gloria mundi!

Mennonites are actually the older of these German-Pietistic sects from which the Amish separated. The Amish here in Michigan live on 40 acre farms on dirt roads, have their one room school houses with teachers who are often their aunts and attend to the 7th grade. They are the most educated people in the world for my money since they speak English, high German for their sunday services as well as the dialect that is described in the blog. These folks also run million dollar businesses and have 6-8 kids by the time that they're in their late 20s. They also live to be older than the average white American, for what it's worth.

There are 80,000 Mennonites in Northern Mexico; been there since the 1920s and thrive because they have the cheese concession. At X-mas I'd find them in the local El Paso Walmart buying stuff for their families back in the Chihuahuan Desert. You'll almost certainly find them in the local airport since Mennonites are free to fly.

The language used in Lancaster as well as the one I'd heard in West Texas is really strange and I can't understand it although I'm fluent in another south German dialect. Maybe compare it to Yiddish, another language budded off from German and used in Russia (that's where many Mennonites lodged for a few centuries). I can read most of it but the flow of words bewildering. The language has drifted and become admixed as it was exposed to other cultures as this population budded off.

When I was a student at Penn State, the library (otherwise an embarrassment) had many shelves of old bound documents from the state legislature, all in German. It was my understanding that state largely dropped German during the first world war, though I think I recall a German column in the Reading Eagle in the 1960s.

That is so interesting! It is really too bad the language was dropped. In the state and city where I live, there are quite a few foreign language newspapers. Chinese for sure (3 of them), and Vietnamese and Korean. There is also Russian. They are of limited circulation, mostly for the immigrant communities.